Plot Summary:'Every age thinks it's the modern age...' - but this one, a time of always-on connectivity, ubiquitous computing, and the acceleration of everything, really is new. No longer even modern, we are allegedly postmodern, post-industrial, and hurtling towards the post-human. With its profusion of desire and superabundance of information, our age couldn't be more different... DREAMS REWIRED offers another perspective. A montage of films from the 1880s to the 1930s, many rare and previously unscreened, it traces contemporary appetites and anxieties back to the birth of the telephone, television and cinema. Its claim: that the social convulsions of today's hyper-mediated world were already prefigured over 100 years ago, during the electric media boom of the late 19th century. Early electric media were as revolutionary as social media are now. They sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination; promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, an end to war. The technologies were to serve everyone, not just the elites. Through strengthening human relationships, increasing efficiency, and predicting the future, it would become possible to build a new world for all to share. But what these media initially promised, and what they eventually delivered was very different. The early radical openness was disciplined and regulated, and two-way, peer-to-peer communication gave way to hierarchical broadcasting. And the fears that had accompanied the hopes - fears of the erosion of privacy, of ubiquitous surveillance, of financial exposure and moral hazard - began to appear well-founded. DREAMS REWIRED is an assemblage of clips from nearly 200 films, ranging from the earliest dramatic works to music hall slapstick, newsreels, marketing materials, recordings of scientific experiments, and artistic adventures with film as medium. Through years of research in archives around the world, the directors have unearthed material that is by turns hilarious, revelatory, aesthetically striking, and astonishingly prescient. This footage is spliced together with a commentary on our contemporary predicament (voiced by Tilda Swinton) that, rather than plunging the audience into the past, pulls the historical material into the present. By forging an identification between contemporary viewers and their idealistic peers from 100 years ago, DREAMS REWIRED suggests a path of positive action towards a 21st century conception of openness.
影片以如今通讯四通八达的时代为起点,回溯到一个世纪之前,电话、电影与电视仍在襁褓之时。和当下的社交媒体相同,这些早期的电子媒介掀起一阵波澜,让公众开始狂热幻想一种乌托邦的存在——人们沟通无障碍、距离不再是问题,世界永归和平。但两个时代也面对同样的困境:人们开始被恐慌支配,害怕个人隐私、安全性被侵犯,道德底线被僭越。影片收录了200多部影片罕见、甚至是未见过天日的档案影像,借古喻今,完成历史未尽的夙愿,规避黑暗漩涡。